This model combines two ideas—about how the forces of nature decrease over cosmic time and about light losing energy when it travels a long distance. It’s been tested and has been shown to match up with several observations, such as about how galaxies are spread out and how light from the early universe has evolved.
These hypotheses never seem to stand up to rigorous analysis. Still, always welcome the discussion.
Absolutely. On the one hand, having ~26% of the known universe consisting of a substance that we cannot detect directly leaves a lot of questions open. On the other hand; dark matter is postulated because otherwise things like galaxy rotation curves don’t match what we believe they should be from general relativity, and this theory doesn’t seem to address that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to_dark_matter
Also, light ‘losing energy’ would be a violation of the first law of thermodynamics, unless it loses it ‘to’ somewhere.
Light does actually just lose energy to nowhere in our current understanding of expanding space.
How does this reconcile with the first law of thermodynamics? Or does it just not?
I’m no expert, and I don’t think we know for sure, but it sounds like it might be related to the increase in vacuum energy from the added space. It’s also possible the total amount of net energy in the universe is 0 and conserved
At some point we may have to review some theories though. The idea that light would lose energy over extra long distances at least makes sense unlike some kind of latter that we can’t detect and we can’t figure out why it would either still be there but not more than it is.
This is kind of how time was supposed to be absolute. Einstein never received a Nobel for the theory of relativity because of how suspicious it seemed at the time.
There being a substance that does not interact with light at all doesn’t seem that far fetched to me. There is nothing in the laws of the universe that says “Humans must be able to detect everything that exists because otherwise it wouldn’t make sense.”
It feels entirely possible that we won’t be able to detect dark matter through any conventional means that we currently have.
It’s not about humans. It’s about science. “there is dark matter that doesn’t interact with matter” can as well be “there is magic, and I cannot be proven wrong”.
Dark matter does interact with matter, though: it interacts gravitationally. It just does not interact in other ways (that we know of yet). All you would have to do to disprove the existence of dark matter is to show that some things interact with it gravitationally but others don’t. However, this is not what we see; what we actually see is a whole bunch of separate things that all experience the effect of the existence of dark matter in the same way. It’s effectiveness as an explanation in this regard is exactly what makes it so difficult to dethrone.
Dark matter is exactly like adding a constant to your equation so that it fits the numbers.
If by “constant” you mean “3D distribution that explains not just one equation but lots of separate observations”, then sure, it’s just like that.
This is the same researcher that said the universe is 26.7 billion years old based on the JWST data instead of 13.8.
Happy to see ideas thrown out there to help us understand what dark matter is, but I’m really looking forward to all the random videos that eventually come out explaining why it holds up against a whole bunch of observational evidence while it ignores all the other observational evidence it doesn’t hold up against.
It’s time for people to start taking this matter lightly.
Well played.
“In standard cosmology, the accelerated expansion of the universe is said to be caused by dark energy but is in fact due to the weakening forces of nature as it expands, not due to dark energy.”
Fascinating! I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. The “tired light” theory they mention doesn’t seem to have held up to scrutiny, but maybe there’s something else about weakening over time or distance that we haven’t observed yet.
How would the gravitational forces weakening accelerate the expansion speed? It would at best “not slow it down”, you can’t explain the speed increase with this logic. That just sounds wrong. Am I missing something?
Would it be that as gravity weakens, the inertial forces of a spinning galaxy allow it to spread without the gravitational drag that would otherwise slow it down as it expanded?
This is purely my filthy casual’s intuitive take. I’m happy to hear what’s off about it.
I think you mixed up galaxies moving away from each other, and a galaxy’s stars etc. moving in space.
As per Einstein’s relativity theory, gravitational force has infinite range. So there will always be some pulling force between galaxies, which means they would eventually slow down and and eventually start moving towards each other. But our observations suggest that they are moving even faster day by day. So there must be some force that is stronger than gravity and it must be somehow pushing objects.
So gravity by itself doesn’t explain the speed increase of universe’s expantion.
sory i eated it all
where were u wen dark matter die
i was sat at home eating milky way when saturn ring
“dark matter is kill”
“no”
when saturn ring
🥇
Glad someone appreciated that, lol
I guess it’s my turn to point out typo like a good grammar police. Eat is ate in past tense. Also you only have one r in sorry.
Anyway, now I shall head to another corner of internet to make my own typos so people can point them out
these typos were intentional
good luck on your typo making endeavors tho!
Just going to assume this popular science article is about a theory with no support as usual.
um i browsed it for nearly two minutes and at the very top of the page there was clearly a chart. i didn’t understand it but obviously we can conclude that it is based on scientific science
I have also seen the picture and can confirm, that it is, in fact, a picture.
*hypothesis. A theory (in the scientific sense) has to be tested and therefore has at least some support!
Fair.
Always has been.
Don’t get too excited, this is a pretty fringe theory that doesn’t really have experimental evidence. They were able to make some observations fit with their theory without dark matter yes, but not all of them. The tired light part in particular has a lot of contradictions with observation that they don’t explain.
So interesting, but far from definitive.
Couldn’t the same be said for the proof of dark matter?
They were able to make some observations fit with their theory with dark matter yes, but not all of them
Generally for a new theory to be accepted, it needs to explain everything that the old theory did plus something more
Couldn’t the same be said for the proof of dark matter?
No, dark matter is actually a great explanation for lots and lots of observations; the only problem with it is that we don’t know anything about it other than that it is such a good explanation for these observations.
I’m a workshop kind of guy that enjoys space documentaries. For my part, I see “dark matter” as a known hole in our current understanding of cosmology, and I bet when we figure out how it does actually work it’ll lead to some really cool TV shows.
If light got tired, wouldn’t everything get blurry the further away it were?
I’m nearsighted, so that happens anyways
Me too but I always knew that it was my eyes not the maximum draw distance of the universe that was to blame.
Only white matter is allowed in this universe.
All Matter Lives.
Black matter lives
White matter matters!
Thin white line!!!
This stuff is way, way over my head. And probably most of humanity right now. In this moment I can feel some envy and admiration towards whoever is around to understand the great breakthroughs we may one day have on this matter.
Coles notes: scientists made calculations on the universe and it didn’t make sense because the math says there should be more mass and energy than what they know exists. So they called the missing mass dark matter and the missing energy, dark energy.
Now some guy in Ottawa figured out better math that doesn’t need the “dark” stuff to make the math make sense.
My understanding of dark energy is a little different. As I understand it, we figured gravity pulls things together, right? So everything should be kinda slowly falling back together from the big bang. It was theorized to end in a ‘big crunch’ where the universe collapses back and then explodes again in a cycle.
Only when they tried to measure how fast distant objects were moving relative to us, they found that things were still moving away from each other. More than that, the farther away things were, the faster they were moving. Meaning distant objects were accelerating.
Acceleration requires energy, but we don’t know the mechanism behind this, or where the energy comes from. Hence, dark energy.
So, dark energy is responsible of the expansion of the universe?
kinda, dark energy is the unknown explanation for the expansion of the universe. Once we understand it enough to know what it is responsible for it’ll no longer be dark.
You humans and your primitive knowledge. The rest of the universe knows that this dark energy you haven’t found out yet is called Mana and allows miracles to be made. /S
Maybe, we don’t know.
Just to be clear, there are lots and lots of different observations that are all explained by dark matter; it’s not just a single term in “the math”. Furthermore, the hypothesis presented in this article is not “better math” because it does not do as good a job as dark matter in explaining all of these observations.
I went and read the research.
I’m not an expert and as such can’t really analyze it fully. But what I took away is that it aimed to test a part of new theory by with a very narrow measurement, using early-universe density oscillations. They left dark matter out of the equation with the new model, and it was a smashing success if you’re willing to overlook that it requires the universe to be a completely different age than it is… In short, this is shenanigans.
edit: I’m fine being wrong if I am, I’d love to know more from informed readers. That’s just what I took away https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1bc6#apjad1bc6s3
edit2: It also presumes the “tired light theory” is true. Tired light is the flat earth of astrophysics/cosmology. Yeah, there are contrarian knuckleheads in every discipline.
Tired light is the flat earth of astrophysics/cosmology.
Does it really say it? Can you please quote the piece?
Is anyone really surprised? Really neat study though!
A neat study… which you know literally nothing about? How can you possibly know it’s neat?
I’m just built different
The Tremendous Space Kablooie fails again.
Dark mind over dark matter, amirite?
Dicks out for dark matter!
seems like a good spot for the dark matter rap https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/weinberg.21/Rap/darkmatterrap.mp3
It’s almost like we shouldn’t have been all in on the thing that literally has less evidence behind it than fucking psychic powers.
Wasn’t the FBI or CIA responsible for making a psychic project? Project Stargate or something?
The Men Who Stare At Goats
It’s not that dark matter was the only theory, there are also different theories based on modified newtonian dynamics (MOND), these aren’t any better than dark matter though, maybe even worse theories.
They say, while being fully behind a hypothesis with no supporting evidence and while not understanding the research.
